From Paddington to Park Place, Turning Familiar IP into a Playable Night Out

Monopoly has a reputation for turning friendly game nights into grudge matches, and Saw has a reputation for making people squirm. So what does it look like to build live, immersive experiences from those worlds and still leave guests feeling satisfied, included, and eager to come back?

We sit down with David Hutchinson, CEO of The Path Entertainment Group, to unpack how modern fandom changes when the audience gets real agency. We talk through the creative and operational decisions behind location-based entertainment and interactive theater, from Monopoly Life-Sized to The Paddington Bear™ Experience. David explains why “value added” is the north star, how a “game inside the game” keeps familiar IP fresh, and why clarity matters more than mystery when you’re asking people to participate.

We also get practical about what outsiders underestimate: the sheer complexity of running a building-scale show, the lack of shared infrastructure across the immersive space, and the need for better language so audiences know what they’re signing up for. If you’ve ever wondered how to honor the iconic moments fans came for while still pushing an IP onto a new canvas, this conversation lays out a clear playbook.

Subscribe to Fandom Unpacked, share this episode with someone building live experiences, and leave a rating and review so more creators can find the show.

Recorded Monday, June 8th, 2026
Host: Damian Bazadona, CEO & Founder, Situation
Guest: David Hutchinson, CEO, The Path Entertainment Group
Producer: Peter Yagecic, Founder, A Mind at Work Consulting

https://situationinteractive.com
https://amindatworkconsulting.com

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Setup

Peter Yagecic 0:04

You're listening to Fandom Unpacked from Situation, the series where we unpack modern fandom with some of the brightest minds in sports and entertainment. I'm producer Peter Yagecic, and our host for today's QA is Situation CEO and founder Damian Bazadona. Our guest today is David Hutchinson, CEO of The Path Entertainment Group, a company that brings together world-class IP with experiential concepts to create incredible live experiences, including the Paddington Bear experience and Monopoly Life-Sized. David, we can't wait to dig in. Damian, how about rolling the dice and getting us started?

Damian Bazadona 0:37

Yeah, thank you, Peter, and thank you, David, for joining us. Thanks

Building A Platform For Agency

Damian Bazadona 0:40

for having me. Yeah, so Pat sits at a really interesting intersection of live entertainment, immersive experiences, and some pretty significant IP. When you describe the company to someone new, what do you say you're actually building?

David Hutchinson 0:56

I think we're building a platform that allows audiences to get closer and more integrated with their favorite stories and brands and characters than ever before, because that's what we're playing with. We're playing with the currency of world-class brands, theatricality, because that is our background. A lot of us are from the theater industry and we love the theater industry, but also allowing audience to have agency in their evenings. So whether it's rolling a dice, whether it's escaping a room, whether it's making morality decisions, you know, there's lots of different ways that you can give agency, but we always like in every one of our experiences for the outcome to be determined on how the users play or make decisions. And that therefore makes it truly unique and feels truly quite um exciting. So yeah, we our key ingredients I always describe it as being, you know, bringing world-class brands with theatrical tool or theatrical toolbox um with elements of social competitive um uh gameplay.

Damian Bazadona 1:54

Yeah. I mean, you guys are uh obviously you've got major players in that space that have trailblazed in it, and I know a lot of other industries and verticals, like people just are fascinated by it, which is exciting. Um, I think a fair number of people still think of fandom as something that sort of happens around sports, film, or music, some of those more obvious places. But your work,

Turning Classic IP Into Play

Damian Bazadona 2:15

I think, suggests fandom could also be built through the participation itself, almost like through their interactivity and an engagement. What have you learned about how audience participation changes the relationship people have with a brand?

David Hutchinson 2:27

I think, you know, a lot of the brands that we work with have multi-generational buy-in. And so I take something like Monopoly, which I think is like 80, 85 years old. There is so much both brand love and awareness and also like personal, you know, memories that come from that board game because everyone's got a story about something that flipped the board or when Auntie such and such lost and lost brought boardwalk. And there, you know, you're coming into it with such levels of affinity that what we then get to play with is giving audiences an interaction or another dimension onto that journey they've never had before. So when we were looking at Monopoly as a concept, we were like the number one thing for us is we do not want to just replicate the board as it were in terms of a life-size big board where you sort of hop scotch around and you pay money. Like we've got to add extra dimensions because otherwise, frankly, what are we adding value-wise to this? Why are we doing it? I mean, it's you know, it's important to us that we're doing something in added value, which is where we found this sort of game-in-a-game element. Like, how can we make every decision on the board? A decision that you have to go further to earn the right to do, from buying properties by completing games to literally escaping the room in jail, to passing go and having to physically grab as much money as you can to get your value. Like, what is the what is the layer beyond that? And I think audiences when they feel comfortable and familiar with a brand. And it's similar for Paddington, where there's a very clear mission at the beginning of the Paddington Bear experience, which is you're here to save marmalade day. And anyone that knows Paddington knows that his marmalade sandwich, which he carries in his hat, is a non-negotiable and it's part of his day-to-day life. And so if there's a lack of oranges in London and we're going to run out of marmalade, that's an existential crisis. And so there's kind of the immediacy into the world is there because of the the sort of shoulders we're standing on of the years and decades of legacy that people have with the brand. So we can then catapult them into the next piece, which is that truly interactive experiential element that we bring to the table.

Damian Bazadona 4:24

Yeah, you and I first met,

Brand Trust And New Story Paths

Damian Bazadona 4:25

I actually met you at the Paddington Experience. And I saw the countless number of people, it's obviously a monster success, right? There's people like the number of people there, which is like, I'm always so jealous. I'm always like, that's just not jealous, happy. Um, just watching just such a success around it. How do you like when you think about creating though new translations of well-loved titles like Paddington and putting the audience agency at the forefront? What does that mean in practice, though, when you're you're taking you're taking someone, something people already know and love and asking them to sort of step inside it? And I would imagine the devil's in the details of producing immersive environments like that where there's a lot of detail to what people expect from these brands. Like, what does it mean in practice as you do it?

David Hutchinson 5:09

Well, I think the first thing, honestly, is to get alignment with the um with the the brand owner or the studio or whoever it is that owns it to ask them genuinely and truly, are you willing to go on this journey? Because it's not, we're not replicating anything. We're not, we're not, we're not, you know, putting a story in its exact format into another format. We are literally going to be going down avenues you've never gone down before. And the thing that's so exciting about experiential is that the decisions being made are out of our control. So you can't control it. It's not sitting in an auditorium and the lights go down and we're good. It is truly going to be something where people discover things and make decisions. And that's honestly the first question we ask. So if the answer is no, then I'm like, there's nothing to do here, we'll move on. Um, in terms of like, you know, how you then sort of place that decision making at the front of it, I think a really good example for us was working with Lionsgate on the Saw experience, which is obviously a very graphic, um, you know, 10 or 11 now probably movie franchise. And at the very, you know, if you sort of look at it top level, you sort of think of it, it's a very violent, you know, movie where people's arms get cut off and they have to sort of pull the teeth out and all sorts. But actually going deeper into it with the owner, who is one of our closest partners, Lionsgate, it's actually a piece about it's that piece about morality, it's a piece about conscience, it's about redemption. It's not just about sawing arms off, it's actually about people redeeming themselves, albeit in a fairly violent way. I'm sure there's other ways of disciplining people outside of them sawing their own hand off. But there we go. That is the world we find ourselves in in that particular brand. And so, you know, for us at the very beginning of the thinking of that process, it was this isn't a piece about violence, this is a piece about redemption. How can we put our audience in a place that makes them uncomfortable because they're redeeming themselves to something they just realized they they've been a part of? And that sort of extra dimension again is where we found our access into that route, which then gave us this sort of show and a show piece where we created this entire fictional um property development company and gave our audiences an inward journey before they then got into the sort of escaping of the rooms. So things like that where it's like, how willing are you going to go, how willing are our partners going to go on that journey? And if they're willing to go on it, we do it well, the audiences will go on that journey with us.

Damian Bazadona 7:13

I think one of the most impressive things I think about your company is just the range of work that you guys do on the just the different types of canvases,

What Makes Experiences Stick

Damian Bazadona 7:20

from stage productions to immersive, from Paddington to Saw, you know, like that's a pretty wide range of stuff. What would you say? Are there any universal ingredients from your experience that make an experience feel emotionally, I don't know, sticky regardless of genre, or like some immediate like no-nos, like guaranteed. Like you've seen enough of this that you know, here's what's gonna guarantee success, or at least, or potentially guarantee not success. I've done this enough to know.

David Hutchinson 7:46

Yeah, I mean, look, I I wish I had the guarantee of success. I think every every person in our sector would love to have that particular skill. And I don't think we, you know, I don't think we possess it particularly, other than we do, you know, we have a few rules around why like it often comes down to why are we doing this, right? Like that you can you can go out there and license a very, very iconic, well-known brand, and and that's fine. But if you're not if you're not doing something that you're adding value to, then honestly, it's not something that I think we should be involved in. We've we've said no to certain things because we couldn't find that that way in. I mean, there's a few things around um multi-generational and multi-year sort of audience awareness of it. I think we have always, you know, we when you create an experience in an unknown or a new location, it's all about having enough audience to make sure you're feeling that. And that does require a pretty, like, you know, a pretty decent size of audience to start with. So that's quite important for us. Um, global recognition is important. Um, you know, the way we build the company, we have flagships such as in London, where we put things up for multiple years, but actually, you know, Monopoly has now been or is going into at least seven international markets over the over the last five years, into the next two. And that's important in terms of our business because we're looking at then how we were then, you know, opening in Mexico in July, for example, and and and into Saudi a few years ago, and into Charlotte, North Carolina. And so, you know, those pieces from a commercial perspective is really important. I think from a um, you know, a user um uh perspective and sort of a critical um success, it we find it's really important to be very upfront with audiences to let them know what it is. Like I think sometimes we can get a bit carried away with our own sort of you know, magicianary around, you know, oh, this is this. But actually, audiences want to know what am I doing? What do I need to wear? What am I, you know, I'm gonna be scared or am I gonna be not scared? Is it I'm gonna have to talk? Am I gonna have to not talk? You know, and and you know, especially in the UK where we're based, you know, that sort of like, you know, anxiety around sort of public, um, you know, public um being brought up in front of an audience having to perform in some way. I think immersive or experiential theatre can sometimes be off-putting because people don't know exactly where they're gonna be put and how comfortable they are with that. So we we like to tell people quite on the nose, this is what it is. But you know, there is no formula. I don't always say is we spend years developing our stuff, like Paddington was three years in the making, Monopoly was two. You know, it we we agonize over the detail and we go down lots of roads that we then come back from and go down another road. And that's down to the trust and partnership with the brands and with the owners that gets us to hopefully the right conclusion at the end.

Damian Bazadona 10:20

Yeah, I all I know is when I see an actor look into the audience and go, let's let's look for an audience memory. I get like sweaty armpits. I'm like, oh my god, my please read those up. Yeah, I try to look the opposite direction. Uh yeah.

David Hutchinson 10:31

You should you should do a pantomime in the UK. It's our annual thing, and the dame will find one person, and that person is who gets picked on for the entire two and a half hours. And watch the number of eyes that go to the floor when she comes out and goes, Oh, I'm looking for someone, and you're like, oh no, here we go. And it is two and a half hours of relentless you. Um so if you're not that person, yeah, it's good to be up front about that stuff.

Quick Break From Damien

Damian Bazadona 10:57

Hey guys, Damien here. I just want to take a quick moment to say if you're enjoying this podcast right now, odds are you're in the business of selling live experiences. And if you don't know my team at the advertising agency situation, you most definitely should. Aside from just being an awesome group of human beings, they're a global team of professionals covering a brand base in sports, arts, theater, culture, museums, or any live experience that requires people coming together. Big, small, all shapes and sizes of brands. You can hit them up at the information below in the show notes.

Competition Without Bad Feelings

Peter Yagecic 11:38

Uh Peter. Uh yeah, we got a couple of questions over at Phantomunpact.com uh ahead of time. And I'd love to have you answer one kind of about the competition that you alluded to before, David, but but more specifically around like winners and losers. So here's the question. I love games, but I told that I'm very competitive. In fact, I'm not allowed to play Monopoly with my family anymore. How do you make sure nobody leaves an experience feeling like they lost the experience? Or does that even matter?

David Hutchinson 12:10

It's a good question because we have had emails from audience members being like, hey, I'm bringing my own mother-in-law. It's one of our first times knowing each other. Will we have fallen out by the end of this game? And you're like, uh, hopefully not. Um, so look, it's interesting. Uh, for Monopoly, there fundamentally there there is at the big end of a game someone who has the highest amount of assets and they are the winner. Um, but what we try and do in the experience and how we built the experience was in a way that it isn't about individual success, and that's something that's a big departure from the game, but like the board game, it's about team success. And so you're not playing in an individual as a person, you're playing in a group. And I know that's like a not huge shift, but it does change the dynamics because suddenly you're sort of succeeding in your group and there's wins and there's losses. Um, we also try and make sure that in you know, in the games we play that the losing route, if there is such a one. So if you're on a, for example, in Monopoly, if you get put in jail, which usually means that you're probably in a bit of a bit of a sticky mess. Um, in our version, the the jail escape is one of the funnest elements of the experience. So it's flipping actually the journey down the sort of loser path, if you will, being as fun, if not even more fun. Um, and we did the same obviously with something like um Saul when we were thinking about the escape room, you know. Usually in the escape rooms, if you don't escape the room, you stay there or you get out. That's not a valuable experience for someone when they paid money to go for an hour-long experience. So we find we found narrative ways of progressing the story, albeit with consequences, because they didn't complete the room, but that in some ways gave them more agency towards the end in the final challenge. So it's it's kind of flipping it on its head and making sure everyone has a good participation in the brand. But yeah, I mean, there are winners and there are losers, and that's life.

Hitting Fan Must Have Moments

Damian Bazadona 13:54

How do you how do you know when you're honoring the thing fans came for? Like, and how do you juggle this, right? So you got an IP that everyone knows, and people are coming for that IP. At least, how do you juggle that idea versus like what people are used to or what they want versus the need to push it to somewhere new? Because you might be on a new canvas. You might say we kind of have to bring the brand into spaces. Like, how do you balance that? It's gotta be tricky.

David Hutchinson 14:16

It is tricky, and it's interesting actually, because I was just talking to a newspaper earlier about one of our more traditional stage shows, dirty dancing, which is probably relevant too, which is so nostalgic and iconic. And if you tell anyone those two words, dirty dancing, they'll say, Nobody puts baby in a corner, the lift. Like you go through nostalgia, nostalgia, nostalgia. And the way we sort of approach things, therefore, and this happens with Monopoly and Paddington and all these other brands that we work with, is we almost do a pinball machine of like what are the absolute must-haves? And there's no point trying to be too clever about it, in my opinion, and sort of remove that. That is that is a nostalgic moment that people want to see and feel, and that's part of the reason they bought a ticket in the majority. So we start with how do we make those moments even greater or even closer to the action or go further on those moments. But the the sort of the the different way of looking at it, which I think we do at Path, is that affords you more agency to go down some new routes because there already is a lot of known structure or a lot of known moments. So again, coming back to Dirty Dancing, sure, it's going to be the story as it is known in the movie on stage, but it gives us the option to maybe look at a few moments on the film that we could go further with on stage. Like, you know, is there an opportunity to look further into some of the moments between father and daughter or the the pennies, if you know the story, pennies trauma and how that's relevant to today's America in some states. And, you know, without being too worthy about it, it actually gives us a good tech, like a good structured thing. Go, we're gonna go further on this and introduce new material and introduce more. And we sort of stand again on the shoulders of the known, and that again relates to Monopoly, Paddington. You know, you can you can go further because you're already you have an audience that are pretty, already pretty comfortable and familiar. But yeah, you can't miss those beats. I don't believe that's great. I mean, it's not. And and if I went to a sports game or if I went to Taylor Swift or whatever, she doesn't sing that song that I really like, then I'm annoyed. And so, you know, there's a mixture. It's the same as artists, I guess, with the new and the old materials, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fair.

Damian Bazadona 16:13

It's it's yeah, you could see it. Like we've we've heard that consistently on this podcast of other, you know, uh, event producers talking about that. How had

What New LBE Creators Miss

Damian Bazadona 16:20

what what would you just specifically in the immersive and or location-based experiences, Lane? We have a lot of people that I feel like that are listening to this podcast that are that have been playing in that, wanting to play in that space. And what do people underestimate? I I feel like I've met a lot, I mean, I could say it was an agency, we've had a lot of different brands come to us going, we're gonna create this amazing immersive thing. And it just doesn't pan out the way that they had expected it. Why is there a theme that you feel like people just underestimate how complicated that is?

David Hutchinson 16:50

I think the thing I would say is that a lot of people coming into this space come from other formats, be it film, theater, music. This is so different to how you construct those uh experiences or those, you know, entertainment verticals. It really is. You're not dealing in in sort of um, you know, um actors on stage for two and a half hours and a prosimi march and back sit. You're dealing with every element of what you're putting in front of the audience being touchable, relatable, and you're running building. You're you know, it's I always describe LBE or immersive as if your sound desk is this big as how you run a show, it's like three times bigger running an experience because you're doing, you know, everything in some ways, which is really exciting though, because then you get to have much more agency with the audience's experience from the moment they book the ticket right the way through the experience to delivery. So I think there's a bit of a kind of like, well, we know how to do this part, and it's and and I'm saying this as someone who comes from a different industry and learned and sometimes learned the hard way, that it's a very different sort of medium. I think the other thing is just like how we communicate what this is to audiences, and this I think is a sector-wide challenge. We haven't got very strong language or infrastructure around this. It still feels a bit like the Wild West. So, again, just comparing it to my own background in a theater, you come into theater, there's structures, there's Broadway League, there's Salt in London, there's there is there's ways of doing things, there's you everything's quite sort of organized. It's not like that here. It's a much more disparate group of great, exciting people that are trying to get into the space now because it's hot, exciting, it's growing 30% year on year. It's it's really exciting. But you suddenly realize there isn't the same infrastructure, there isn't the same networks, and that's harder. You're a bit more out there by yourself. Um, and I'd say certainly in London, because I'm based there, we're there's a good conversation happening with a lot of us that are in this space about let's now just take a beat to bring this together. Let's talk about even just you know, even on this podcast, we've spoken about, you know, the world that I play in in three different ways: immersive, experiential, LB, location-based entertainment. Like even that for audiences can be confusing. So I think it's just about kind of slightly wrapping arms around this and what we're doing, how we're doing it, and then being able to relate that forward to audiences and to stakeholders. So it feels like this is the scale-up growth industry that it is, because it's significantly a growth area in entertainment, live entertainment.

Quick Break For Peter

Damian Bazadona 19:20

Hey guys, Damien here. If you're listening to this podcast, I'm gonna bet that you're probably thinking about how your team works and adapts right now in this new technology landscape. That's why the one person I always point people to is my co-host, right here, Peter Yagecic, and his company, A Mind at Work Consulting. They run smart, tech-infused workshops that help teams build new skills and actually put ideas into action. Peter is way too humble to brag, but I have no problems bragging for him. So if you're serious about what's next, talk to a Mind at Work Consulting. More in the show notes below.

Helping Shy Guests Join In

Peter Yagecic 20:02

I'd love to get one more Lister question in before we wrap. So this touches a little bit to what you and Damian were talking about with kind of like the audience participation, whether it's with pantomime or, you know, those people who really don't want to be involved. Um, for someone who's never done one of these experiences, but is open to participate, but maybe they're a little reticent. Is there something, are there reliable techniques that can be used to kind of open their shell up and bring them in a little bit?

David Hutchinson 20:28

It's interesting because uh a concept that everyone's I say everyone, a number of audiences struggled with when we opened Monopoly was that you can actually play in a group with people you don't know. And if you don't book all that group out, you will potentially be put in with a number of people you don't know. And that's for especially for British people. Remember, we're so, you know, we we've got our space and we've got our our um our uh our our introvert nature. Um, it was a challenge, and actually we had to then work double time with how we then manage that audience experience on the boards, and that's done very well by the tokens. We we have actors that are playing the tokens, and a big part of their role is it's not icebreakers, it's giving people agency within a group so they feel they have something that they're bringing to it. So they get assigned a banker, you get assigned someone who's the role, the dice roller. And I know this all sounds really quite pedestrian and simple, but little things like that, which was introduced year two, by the way, this wasn't how we started. We we learned, we optimized, and that's been the nature of most of the things we've done. It just kind of gives people a space and a place in the group that then suddenly allows everyone to feel like they're on equal footing. And again, I don't mean this to sound too simple, but like it really did make a difference. And we now hear stories of people coming down to the bar afterwards and having lunch with people they just met, people that came back a second time to play another board with people they didn't know, like things like that. So I put it back on us, not audiences. Your lives come in and feel a bit awkward if you're playing with people or with people you don't know. It's for us to break that down and to make it tangible and to make it comfortable for the

The Future Of Going Out

David Hutchinson 21:58

audiences, and that's hopefully what we've managed to achieve with some of our experiences.

Damian Bazadona 22:02

David, this is uh hey, thank you for spending time with us. I stand so impressed by the range of work that you do. You're like the guy I point to. I'm like, you gotta talk to David all across all these campuses. Five years from now, you go five years, what do you hope audiences will expect from live entertainment that they may not be demanding yet?

David Hutchinson 22:20

Well, I think audiences already in the way that they they put value proposition against their nights are changing. And I think this is honestly where I I got very excited about this space. Um, is that you know, when we think about what people come away from their evenings with, it's not it's no longer just memories, it's now about content, it's about fit like visual representations of those moments and it's about doing things and and experiencing things that that that are world-changing. So I think in lots of ways we've got to continue to develop as an industry. We've got to continue to um give our audiences a reason to be looking for experiences as the next thing that they can go out for nights out on. Um, and I think in five years, I'd like to hope that the location-based industry has uh a cadence with audiences that they search out for what the experiences are in the same ways I think other mediums such as music and theater have now gotten to a cadence of I go to the theater. I want people to say I go to experiences in a way that feels part of the cultural norm. I think that's the opportunity, but we've got a lot of work to do to get that organization around it to get there. I think that's a great moonshot, though. Uh, Peter, you want to take us out?

Peter Yagecic 23:26

That's gonna do it for this episode of Fandom Unpacked. Thank you, David and Damian. If you liked what you heard today, please check out all the great QA interviews we've done over at fandomunpack.com, or by searching Fandom Unpacked and following the series in your podcast Player of Choice. We'd also love for you to rate and review the show while you're at it. That really helps us find new fans. We're gonna be back in your feed in a couple of weeks for the entire Fandom Unpack team. I'm Peter Yagecic. We'll see you next time.